Monday, November 29, 2010

Colonel Vasiliev, a GRU officer, was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in Budapest in 1983 and given the code name GT/ACCORD. He identified a GRU network in which a U.S. Army sergeant, Clyde Conrad, had been active in West Germany. Vasiliev enabled the Swedish security police to arrest Conrad’s controllers, Dr. Sandor Kercsik and his younger brother Imre, and to roll up a large Hungarian military intelligence network headed by a retired warrant officer, Zoltan Szabo. Although Vasiliev tipped off the CIA in 1985 to the existence of Szabo’s huge Hungarian spy ring, which extended into Italy, his role in the investigation had been skillfully concealed, so it was a surprise when he was suddenly taken into KGB custody in December 1986 and executed the following year.